29 Mar 12 | Asia and Pacific, Index Index, minipost
A Chinese human rights lawyer has been visited in prison by his family for the first time since he disappeared over two years ago. Gao Zhisheng, China’s best known human rights lawyer, was sentenced to three years in jail in 2006 for “inciting subversion of state power.” He was put on probation for five years, which meant he did not have to serve the sentence, but he was taken into custody throughout that period. Gao was taken from a relative’s home in northern China in February 2009. Last December, in the first official account of his whereabouts, state media reported that Gao was back in jail.
21 Jan 12 | Asia and Pacific, China
The defection of Chinese writer and dissident Yu Jie last week revealed shocking allegations of torture and beatings more usually associated with rogue American troops in Iraq.
Yu, a close friend of imprisoned Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo, is most famous for his mocking attack on the country’s premier, China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao, published in Hong Kong in late 2010.
Yu fled with his family to the US on 11 January. Shortly after, he held a press conference in Washington and released a written statement on why he had chosen to defect. Below we pick out the most shocking of these claims.
Though I was physically in China, I became an ‘exile at heart’ and a ‘non-existent person’ in the public space.
Illegal house arrests, torture, surveillance, tracking, and being taken on ‘trips’ became part of my everyday life.
Several of the plainclothes officials came at me again and began beating me in the head and the face without explanation. They stripped off all my clothes and pushed me, naked, to the ground, and kicked me maniacally. They also had a camera and were taking pictures as I was being beaten, saying with glee that they would post the naked photos online.
They forced me to kneel and slapped me over a hundred times in the face. They even forced me to slap myself. They would be satisfied only when they heard the slapping sound, and laughed madly. They also kicked me in the chest and then stood on me after I had fallen to the ground.
The head state security officer told him:
If the order comes from above, we can dig a pit to bury you alive in half an hour, and no one on earth would know… If the central authorities think that their rule is facing a crisis, they can capture [all China’s dissidents] in one night and bury them alive.
While the post-Tiananmen Square period was a time when Chinese dissidents defected in their droves, there is still a steady trickle of Chinese who seek refugee status overseas. Some of them leave legally, while others, who are denied passports or the right to leave smuggle themselves out, usually via Vietnam. They include fellow writer Liao Yiwu, who has been living in Germany since 2011; Chinese diplomat, Chen Yonglin, who fled to Australia in 2005; and AIDS activist Wan Yanhai, who left for the United States in 2010. The wife of Chinese dissident human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, Geng He, has also been living in the US for the past two years. Her husband is currently serving a three-year prison sentence for violating probation rules, having been missing for more than a year.
03 Jan 12 | Asia and Pacific, China
The brother of Chinese dissident human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has told two news agencies that his brother is now in a Xinjiang prison, being the first confirmation of his whereabouts in 20 months.
Gao Zhiyi added that he received a notice last Sunday informing him that his brother was back in prison because a court had revoked his probation, and that he would have to serve a further three years. Chinese state media reported last month that he had violated his probation.
In 2006 Gao Zhisheng was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for “subversion of state power”, having defended the rights of political and religious dissenters such as the Falun Gong, an outlawed spiritual sect in China. Since 2009 he has largely been held incommunicado. In the same year he was taken from a relative’s home in Shaanxi province, northern China, resurfacing briefly in March 2010, when he told the Associated Press he had been tortured. He disappeared again soon after.
Gao’s case is one of the most high-profile abuses of human rights in China, drawing widespread condemnation from the international community and calls for his release.
16 Dec 11 | Asia and Pacific, Index Index, minipost
Chinese state media reported on Friday that human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng will be sent to prison for three years for violating his probation rules. In 2006 Gao was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for “subversion of state power”, being given five years of probation. In 2009 he was taken from a relative’s home in Shaanxi province, northern China, resurfacing briefly in March 2010 and alleging he had been tortured. He disappeared again soon after.
